October 24, 2018

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is condemning the Trump administration’s latest attempt to advance the plague of religiously motivated discrimination.

According to a leaked Trump administration memo, multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, are considering a policy to redefine gender to correspond exclusively with an individual’s biological sex at birth. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence,” the memo states. This plan to undo the limited progress toward protecting transgender individuals from discrimination is pushed primarily by dogmatic ideologues who are motivated by their religion and are personally uncomfortable with the fact that gender is not simply binary.

Churches and preachers who insist that the rest of the country adopt their binary “Adam and Eve” view of personhood are propping up the crusade to denigrate transgender individuals by portraying them as predators who want to sneak into the wrong restroom. It is improper and dangerous for the federal government to turn ancient ignorant beliefs into modern policy. And it’s especially heartless in this instance because the current policy shift serves no purpose other than to scapegoat people who are already among the most ostracized from society for no reason other than malice and ignorance.

The United States is a secular nation. FFRF insists that the federal government abandon religiously motivated bigotry in favor of science, empathy, and humanity. Progress in American civil rights has long fought against the forces of religion.

“This is what you get when you mix religion and government,” comments FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Our founders recognized that religious dogma turned into national policy can only lead to divisiveness and disaster.”

FFRF encourages Americans who care about their LGBTQ friends and neighbors to vocally oppose this new discriminatory policy at every turn.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit with more than 32,000 members around the country. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

Photo via Shutterstock by Nito

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wis., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational charity, is the nation's largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics), and has been working since 1978 to keep religion and government separate.